The AI coding boom has been filled with speculation. Opinions range from AI being completely useless for development to AI wiping out 90% of developer jobs—leaving only the elite architects. After using AI extensively to build a new personal website, here are my thoughts.
The Good
Speed
While working on this website, AI significantly accelerated development. Creating new component structures, handling styling and theming, and even writing TypeScript scripts to parse my blog post Markdown files became noticeably easier and faster.
Less time on the boring stuff
Personally, colors, theming, and tiny aesthetic details are not things I enjoy working on. They often feel tedious and create a lot of decision fatigue. AI handled this surprisingly well—it could pick colors, produce a “good enough” design, and let me move on to the parts of development I actually enjoy.
Control over AI’s creative freedom
Developers can choose how much control to give AI. You can drill deep into implementation details with precise prompts, or you can let the AI take more ownership and inject its own opinions. That flexibility is powerful. In many ways, prompt engineering is starting to become the new programming.
The Bad
Promotes laziness
Many developers (myself included) agree that reading code is more mentally taxing than writing it. You have to get into the author’s head and reverse-engineer their thought process. With AI-generated code, this can feel even more draining despite being more efficient overall.
As a result, some developers fall into pure vibe coding, shipping code they don’t fully understand. This lack of comprehension can easily introduce vulnerabilities and complex issues later on.
Reduced understanding
In my experience, no matter how thoroughly you read someone else’s code, it never matches the level of understanding you have for code you wrote yourself. For a personal website, this tradeoff isn’t a huge deal - it may make future changes more expensive, but the risk is low.
In larger production systems, especially those handling user data, this lack of understanding can be extremely risky and costly.
Lack of creativity
While giving AI control over design can be convenient, it inevitably leads to less creativity. If 100 people ask an AI to “generate a personal website,” most of them will end up with something that looks nearly identical. Developers can spend time customizing their own design and guiding the AI to build it, but many will ask “Why bother?” when the AI’s default design is good enough.
Many already dislike the increasing “corporatization” of the web, the loss of soul and human touch in design. Heavy reliance on AI will only accelerate that trend.
Conclusion
AI is here, and it’s changing the development landscape whether we like it or not. As developers, we can choose to adapt or die. Will you choose to be a vibe coder and let AI take over, or will you put in the effort to understand what you’re building and remain in control of the tools you use?
The choice is yours.